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The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
|budget = £42,000 |cast = Brain Donlevy Jack Warner Richard Wordsworth Margia Dean Maurice Kaufmann|imagecat = The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)|followed_by = Quatermass 2}} The Quatermass Xperiment (a.k.a. The Creeping Unknown in the United States) is a 1955 British science-fiction horror film drama from Hammer Film Productions, based on the 1953 BBC Television serial The Quatermass Experiment written by Nigel Kneale. The film was produced by Anthony Hinds, directed by Val Guest, and stars Brain Donlevy as the eponymous Professor Bernard Quatermass. Jack Warner, Richard Wordsworth, and Margia Dean appear in supporting roles. The film's US release was as a double feature with The Black Sleep. Three astronauts are launched into space aboard a rocket designed by Professor Quatermass, but the spacecraft returns to earth with only occupant, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth). Something has infected him during the spacefilght, and he begins mutating into an alien organism. which, if it spawns, will engulf the Earth and destroy humanity. When the Carron-creature escapes from custody, Quatermass and Scotland Yard's Inspector Lormax (Jack Warner), have just hours to track it down and prevent a catastrophe. Plot The British Rocket Group, headed by the taciturn Professor Bernard Quatermass, launches its first manned rocket into space. Shortly thereafter, all contact is lost with the rocket and its there person crew: Carroon, Reichenheim, and Green. The large rocket later returns to Earth, crashing into an English country field. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh arrive at the scene, along with the local emergency services, Carroon's wife Judith, Rocket Group physician Dr. Briscoe, and Blake, a Ministry official who chides him repeatedly for launching the rocket om impulse and without offical permission. The rocket's hatch is fanlly opened, and the space-suited Carroon stumbles out; inside, three is no sign of the other two crew members. Carroon is in shock, only able to say the worlds "Help me". Inside the rocket, Quatermass and Marsh can find only the completely-fastened spacesuits of the other two crewmen. Carroon is taken to Briscoe's office for care, on the grounds that conventional hospitals and doctors would have no idea how to evaluate or treat the world's first returned astronaut suffering from some sort of adverse event while in space. But even with Briscoe's care, Carroon remains mute, generally immobile, but alert with his eyes which now have a feral and cunning aspect. Briscoe also discovers a strangley disfigured place on his shoulder, and notices changes his face which sugget some sort of mutation of the underlying bone structure. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard Inspector Lomax has undertaken investigation of the other two men's disappearance and, having surreptitiously fingerprinted Carroon as a suspect, alerts Quatermass that the prints are nothing like a human's. At Judith's insistence that Briscoe is not helping her husband, Quatermass agrees to have Carroon transferred to a regular hospital, under guard. Meanwhile, Marsh has developed film from a camera that was aboard the rocket, and Quatermass. Lomax and Briscoe watch it. The crew are seen for a time pleasantly at their duties: then suddenly, something seems to jar the ship. After that, there is a nightmarish wavering in the air inside the rocket, and the men react as if something frightening, yet not manifestly visible, is there in the cabin with them. One by one they fall, Carroon the last to go. Quatermass and Briscoe determinefrom the evidence at hand that something living outer space has entered the ship, dissolved Reichenheim and Green in their sealed spacesuits, and evidently enteres Carroon's body, which is now in the process of being changed by this unknown entity. Not knowing any of this, Carroon's wife, Judith, hires a private investigator, Christie, to break her husband out of the second hospital. The escape is succesful, but not before Carroon smashes a potted cactus in his hospital room, fuses it into his flesh, then kills the private investigator and absorbs all the forces of life his body, leaving just a shrivelled husk. It does not take long for Judith to discover what is happening to her husband; Carroon flees and disappears into the London night, leaving her screaming outside the hospital, alive unharmed, but entirely mad from fright. Inspector Lomax then initates a manhunt for the missing Carroon, who goes to a neabry pharmacy and kills the chemist, using his now-swollen, crusty, cactus-thorn-riddled hand and arm as a cudgel and leaving a twisted empty husk of the man to be found by police. Quatermass theorizes that Carroon had used select chemicals taken from the shelves to "speed up a change going on inside of him." After hiding out on a river barge. Carroon encounters a little girl the next morning, leaving her also unharmed through sheer force of willpower. That night finds Carroon at a zoo. barely visible amongst some shadowed bushes with far less of his human form remaining. In the morning, twisted corpses of zoo animals are found, their life forces having all been absorded, and a trail of smile leading back out into the community. Among the bushes, Quatermass and Briscoe also find a small but living remnat of what was once Victor Carroon, and take it back to their laboratory. From his examination of this remnat, Quatermass concludes that some kind of alien life has completely taken over and will eventually release reproduction spores, endangering the entire planet. The remnant eventually dies of starvation, locked in a glass cage. On a tip to police from Roise Wrigley, a vagrant tippler, Lomax and his men track the main mutation to Westiminster Abbey, where it has crawled high up on a metal work scaffolding inside. It now is a gigantic shapeless mass of combined animal and plant tissue with eyes, distended nodules, and tentacte-like fronds filled with spores. Quatermass arrives, arranges for electric cables being used by a BBC company broadcasting from within the Abbey, to be attached to the scaffolding. By having all the power in London diverted through the cables and into the scaffolding, Quatermass succeeds in cremating the Carroon-creature by electrocution, just as it has entered the final phase before release of its spores. The threat eliminated, Quatermass quickly walks out of the Abbey. preocucupied by his throughts. He ignores all who ask questions. Marsh, his assistant, approaches and asks "What are we going to do?" Never breaking stride, Quatermass offhandedly replies, "We're going to start again" He leaves Marsh behind, walking into the London night, and sometime later a second manned rocket roars into space. Cast Production The screenplay, written by the American B-film scenarist, Richard Landau, and heavily revised by Val Guest, presents a reworked verison of the events of the oringial television serial. Among the plot changes are the elimination of the gangster episode. The most significant plot change, however, occurs at the climax of the film. In the television version, Quatermass appeals to the last vestiges. of the creature's humanity and convinces it to commit suicide to save the world. In the film Quatermass kills the creature by massive electrocution. Nigel Kneale was critial of the changes made for the film adaptation, and also of the casting of Brain Donlevy, whose brusque interpretation of Quatermass was not to his liking. To make the film's plot convincing to audiences, Guest employed a high degree of realism, directing the film in a style akin to a newsreel. The film was shot on location in London, Windsor, Bray and at Hammer's Bray Studios. Carroon's transformation was effected by makeup artist Phil Leakey, who worked in conjunction with cinematographer Walter J. Harvey to accentuate Wordsworth's naturally gaunt features to give him an increasingly menacing, yet tragically in-pain, appearance. Sepcial effects, including a model of the fully mutated creature seen at the climax, were prodvided by Les Bowie. The music was composed by James Bernard, the first of many scores he wrote for Hammer. Hammer marketed the film in the United Kingdom by dropping the "E" from "Experiment" in the title to emphasie the adults-only 'X' Certificate given to the film by the British Board of Film Censors. Upon general release in 1955, the film formed one half of the highest grossing double bill in the UK. It was the first Hammer production to attract the attention of a major US distributor, in this case United Artists, who distributed the film under the title The Creeping Unknown. Its success led to Hammer production an increasing number of horror films, including two sequels Quatermass 2 (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967), making them synonymous with the genre. The Quatermass Xperiment is regarded as the first of these "Hammer Horrors". Development The Quatermass Experiment was originally a six-part TV serial broadcast by BBC Television in 1953. Written by Nigel Kneale, it was an enormous success with critics and audiences alike, later described by film historian Robert Simpson as "event television, emptying the streets and pubs". Among its viewers was Hammer Films producer Anthony Hinds, who was immediately keen to buy the rights for a film version. Incorporated in 1934, Hammer had developed a niche for itself making second features, many of which were adaptations of successful BBC Radio productions. Hammer contacted the BBC on 24 August 1953, two days after the transmission of the final episode, to inquire about the film rights. Nigel Kneale also saw the potential for a film adaptation and, at his urging, the BBC touted the scripts a*round a number of producers, including the Boulting Brothers and Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat. Kneale met with Sidney Gilliat to discuss the scripts but Gilliat was reluctant to buy the rights as he felt any film adaptation would inevitably receive an 'X' Certificate from the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), restricting admission to persons over the age of sixteen. Hammer was not so reticent, deciding from the outset that they would deliberately pursue an 'X' Certificate. Hammer's offer met some resistance within the BBC, with one executive expressing reservations that The Quatermass Experiment was not suitable material for the company, but the rights were nevertheless sold for an advance of £500. Nigel Kneale was a BBC employee at the time, which meant that his scripts were owned entirely by the BBC. He received no extra payment for the sale of the film rights. This became a matter of some resentment on Kneale's part, and when his BBC contract came up for renewal he demanded and secured control over any future film rights for his work. Despite his, Kneale remained bitter over the affair until the BBC made an Ex-gratia payment of £3,000 to him in 1967, in recognition of his creation of Quatermass. The film was co-produced by Robert L. Lippert, an American film producer and distributor. Hammer had entered into an arrangement with Lippert in 1951 under which Lippert prodvided finance and supplied American stars for Hammer's films and distributed them in the United States. In return Hammer's distribution arm, Exclusive Films, distributed Lippert's films in the United Kingdom. Quota laws in the UK meant that US films had to have a British supporting feature, so it was in the American studios' interests to fund these features to recover a greater proportion of the box office receipts. Writing The first draft of the screenplay was written by Richard Landau, an American who had worked on six previous Hammer productions, including Spaceways (1953), one of the company's first forays into science fiction. Landau made significant changes in condensing the action to less than half the length of the original teleplay. The opening thirty minutes of the television version are covered in just two minutes in the Hammer film. In the process Landau played up the horror elements of Kneale's original teleplay. Aware that the film would be co-funded by American bakers, Landau added a transatlantic dimension to the script; Quatermass's "British Rocket Group" became the "British-American Rocket Group" and the character of his assistant, Briscoe, was rewritten as a US Air Force flight surgeon. Quatermass himself was demoted to a doctor and written much more as an action hero than the thoughtful scientist created by Nigel Kneale. Some characters from the television version, such as the journalist James Fullalove, are omitted altogether. Judith Carroon's role in the film version is reduced to little more than that of the stricken astronaut's anxious wife, whereas in the television version she is also a prominent member of Quatermass's Rocket Group. A subplot involving an extramarital affair between her and Briscoe is also left out of the film version. Kneale was particularly aggravated by the dropping from his original teleplay the notion that Carroon has absorbed not only the bodies but also the memories and the personalities of his two fellow astronauts. This change leads to the most significant difference between the two versions: in the television version, Quatermass makes a personal appeal to the last vestiges that remain of the three absorbed astronauts to make the creature commit suicide before it can spore, whereas in the film version Quatermass kills the creature by electrocution. Director Val Guest defended thsi change believing it was "filmically a better end to the story". He also felt it unlikely that Brian Donlevy's gruff interpretation of Quatermass would lend itself to talking the creature into submission. External links * * * * Category:Films of the 1950s Category:1950s Category:Monster films Category:1955 films